There has been a great deal of recent activity aimed at developing applications that personalize an individual's television viewing experience. Many of these applications require explicit input from the user. Such user input may take one or more of a wide range of forms, depending on the purpose of the application. For example, if the application is designed to help the user record their favorite shows, then the input may require the user to navigate through a series of menus, or it may require the press of a single button, such as a “thumbs up” or “RECORD” when the show is on. Requiring the user to provide explicit input is often perceived by the user as being “too much work” for the benefit of personalization. This has led to low adoption of these types of personalization systems.
Conversely, personalization systems that use no explicit user input, and which instead rely solely on implicit data, face a number of difficulties that must be overcome in order for the system to be effective. One such difficulty is determining when the viewer is actually watching television. Another is interpreting remote control button events to determine which programs the viewer likes best.
The nature of the first issue is not as obvious as it might at first appear. The data generated by the viewer's viewing habits will originate from the set top box (STB), and most viewers rarely turn the STB off. In addition, the STB generally has no connection to the TV set that would allow it to determine whether or not the TV is actually on. Accordingly, there currently exists no straightforward way of knowing, based solely on STB status, whether or not the viewer is actively watching TV. Even if viewers always turned off their STBs when they were finished watching television, one still would not be able to reliably conclude that the viewers were watching TV simply because the STB was on. The viewer could be asleep, or they could be out of the room, and there would be no way to tell.
The second issue is closely related to the first in that they both rely on button events. However, whereas the first issue relies on button presses to determine if the viewer is actively watching TV, the second must impose some meaning on the button presses to determine if the viewer is interested in the current program.